Songkick Wants to Be Our Crowdsourced Concert Scrapbook

As the rest of the music business plummets, ticket sales remain aloft — perhaps because the experience of seeing music made right there in front of you, with other live humans around, cannot be downloaded at any price.

Songkick hopes to give us somewhere to go before the lights go up and after the last fan has left the venue. The site already allowed people to talk about and purchase tickets for upcoming shows, but now, they have painstakingly assembled concert information from thousands of sources to create a 1-million-song database of shows that’s sort of like “Wikipedia meets Twitter” for live music.

Fans can add photos, videos, setlists, ticket stub images, posters, original reviews and links to professional reviews to each show listing. To keep tabs on your favorite stuff, you can follow people, bands, venues or festivals, a la Twitter.

“There’s a big silo around specific artists” when it comes to their past shows, explained Songkick co-founder and CEO Ian Hogarth. “What we’ve done is crawl and cull this information from thousands of sites all across the web, and stitched it together enough to make a giant database of live musical history.”

To get the ball rolling on this partially crowdsourced resource, Songkick staff added more than a million shows to the database, with new show information coming from agreements with 29 ticketing agencies. Songkick can analyze your iTunes or Windows Media Player music collection and import the artists in your collection into the site to monitor upcoming shows (although adding the shows you’ve seen is a manual affair). Once you’re tracking your favorite artists, people, venues and so on, you can sit back as show dates, reviews, photos, videos and so on come to you.

“There’s a feed for all the objects on the site, whether it’s an artist, or a concert, or a user, or a venue,” said Hogarth. “It’s the first application that lets you track your friends — the people you go to concerts with — to share ideas about that. But you could also use it to track, for example, the editor of Pitchfork, the editor of Drowned in Sound or the editor of NME.com, or any site that you respect in terms of critical opinion, to see what these influential music bloggers are going to. A number of those people have been helping us test out the site, and so that’s where that comes from.”

Like Twitter, Songkick is not just about following other people — it’s also about showing off. Some fans have uploaded ticket stub images for every show they’ve ever attended, back to the ’80s, while band listings display the users who have seen the band the most times. At this point, you need to go to someone’s Songkick page in order to see what they’ve attended, but coming soon is the ability to display your live music attendance record on social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Songkick’s system is fairly encyclopedic, containing the first rock show I ever attended (Fleetwood Mac at the Hartford Civic Center) as well as more obscure stuff, like the Belle and Sebastian performance at the Bowlie Weekender (the progenitor of today’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals). And the fact that Songkick tracks opening bands as well means you can easily identify every band that has opened for Radiohead, as well as see when your favorite bands toured most actively, using a timeline interface that represents live gigs with shaded areas (pictured to the right).

Now for the money question — as in, how does Songkick intend to make any? Hogarth told us Songkick receives fees from ticketing agencies when someone buys a ticket through the site (at no extra cost to the consumer), and said it also plans to make money by selling live concert merchandise and including local and general advertisements.